"Pandesal Money and Scientific Steel:The things people steal now"

"Pandesal Money and Scientific Steel:The things people steal now"

by: 

Virgilio F. De leon Jr. MD

In recent news you have probably read about the Grade 6 pupil who was selling Pandesal to help finance his education only to get robbed in broad daylight by a bunch of remorseless people.

You also must have read about Seismic monitoring equipment near the active Mt. Mayon getting stolen ,the metal of the installation sold for scrap and batteries taken to be sold as well. 

It would be so easy to get angry and I did get angry with these two things but on the other hand it spoke to me of the great poverty and apathy that has descended on us as a nation , us a people. It made me sad beyond words. Well sadder because every time you look at the news there is nothing worth celebrating about. You have killings left and right , you have vehicular accidents , you have politicians stealing peoples hard earned money.

I mean a defenseless child who has meager earnings from the bread that he sells.As a devils advocate I would say that he does provide an easy target but what kind of society are we living in where the amount is so small and yet the these people took it from him anyway. A Society of poverty. One that we are wallowing in right now. No amount is too small now. I mean if you think about it , the penalty for getting a couple of hundreds of pesos is a couple of years in prison. I don't think that it is worth your time to steal that small amount. Then again if you have no means to steal like a politician in government you would still probably take away money from a helpless child.

And how about the monitoring equipment? It measures earthquakes so that the people in the surrounding areas could be warned when Mt. Mayon explodes. Again an easy target since there are no security measures in place. There shouldn't be a need for one in the first place because the equipment is something that would benefit all the people in the area and therefore it is assumed that no one would tamper with it. And yet the perpetrators of this crime did it anyway. They were not thinking of the much broader effect that this would have  on others. They probably wanted to fill their stomachs and their wallets. Who cares if the other people in the area perish from a volcanic explosion right? At least busog naman daw sila. 

I do not know what happened to peoples sense of judgement.To be sure they have lost it because they have done these things.They might reason that if the child had a companion they might not have done it or if there was a security guard in the Monitoring equipment site then they probably never got anything from there. People have become more desperate and hopeless and these are the signs. Our own society and its great divide are getting wider and wider. Those who are at the very bottom find themselves resorting to stealing to survive and there is no way to sugar coat something like that.